"Unknown Parse Mode!" when validating with DOCTYPE chosen to force STRICT mode in Mozilla

Following the advice/guidance from L David Baron at :

	http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla%27s_DOCTYPE_sniffing

my recent Dreamweaver templates have all used the following DOCTYPE :

	<!DOCTYPE html SYSTEM "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

which is intended to force Mozilla into "Full Standards" mode,
since we wish to avoid accidentally exploiting any of Mozilla's
"Almost Standards" behaviours.

Until recently this caused no problems, but on re-validating
today I received the following diagnostic :

> Unknown Parse Mode!
> 
> The MIME Media Type (text/html) for this document is used 
 > to serve both SGML and XML based documents, and it is not
 > possible to disambiguate it based on the DOCTYPE Declaration
 > in your document. Parsing will continue in SGML mode.

I do not recollect seeing this diagnostic earlier in the development
cycle, and I do not believe it would be helpful for my webmasters
to see this when validating their pages.  Short of reverting to
Mozilla's "Almost Standards" mode by using a PUBLIC declaration
as opposed to a SYSTEM, is there any other way of explaining to
the validator that we do, please, want SGML rather than XML-mode
parsing ?

Philip Taylor, RHBNC.
--------
"Loose" is unfortunately needed because a co-developer
is still using some older-style element/attribute pairs
(<div align="...">, for example).

Received on Wednesday, 12 July 2006 15:04:29 UTC